But Shibasaki produces something far more evocative and far-reaching. You can imagine this novella in a different writer’s hands, squeezed into the small frame of a romance or detective story. He is gradually drawn out of his shell by Nishi, a woman who lives upstairs, and together they investigate the mystery of the sky-blue house next door. Taro lives alone, one of the last tenants in a Tokyo apartment block which will be torn down as soon as the remaining people move out. Ostensibly, the story follows Taro, a solitary divorcee still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his father. This understated, lyrical approach is most obvious in Spring Garden. This influential work eschewed dramatic plot-twists and intrigue, instead foregrounding the thoughts, feelings and impressions of the storyteller. Goosen attributes the novella’s enduring popularity to the lyrical and autobiographical legacy of works like The Gossamer Years, an intimate diary of a lonely Japanese noblewoman written in the tenth century. Indeed, one of the country’s most sought-after literary awards is the semi-annual Akutagawa Prize for short fiction (Kawakami won the prize in 1996, Shibasaki in 2014). This is an oversimplifed picture of Japanese reading habits – novels are consumed in large numbers there too – but there is definitely more appetite and reverence for shorter stories there. The tradition tends to favor shorter works the novel may rule the West, but not Japan, where short stories have been regarded as ‘purer’ than longer, ostensibly more commercial efforts.
Japanese literature has lyrical roots, and thus places more stress on atmosphere and beauty, and less on structured plot, than its Western cousins. However, McEwan built his career on two short story collections and a novella, and later won the Booker Prize with the slim novel Amsterdam he has nothing but admiration for the form, and asserts that That somehow the author is trying to swindle an unsuspecting public with an unfinished, under-length and undercooked novel. ‘If you pitch a book to a bookseller as a novel, you’re likely to get more orders than if you call it a novella.’ Despite the superlative achievements of Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Anton Chekhov or Virginia Woolf, there still lingers a sense that the novella writer has, in Ian McEwan’s words, ‘done something unmanly or dishonest’. ‘For me, the word denotes a lesser genre,’ a literary agent told The Guardian in 2011. Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (trans Polly Barton), Slow Boat by Hideo Furukawa (trans David Boyd) & Record of a Night Too Brief b y Hiromi Kawakami (trans Lucy North) This post is free to all website visitorsįor access to the full New Welsh Review archive, become a subscriber today.
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